It’s “only” 4.2 lightyears away (25 trillion miles), as the New York Times reported.
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But the discovery of Proxima b isn’t the end.
Orbiting the Proxima Centauri red dwarf star, the planet – called “Proxima b” – has characteristics that could be potentially earth-like. Additionally, the time it takes for the planet to circle the star is a mere 11.2 days. Succeeding in the search for the nearest terrestrial planet beyond the solar system has been an experience of a lifetime.
Any life would have to be able to survive powerful UV rays and X-ray flares that bombard the planet.
NASAs Kepler space telescope has discovered more than 2,300 exoplanets to date by studying how a stars light dims when a planet passes in front of it as viewed by the spacecraft.
The discovery comes as the product of 30 years of research by an global team of astronomers, including Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Science. But Professor Stephen Hawking and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg have announced Starshot – an ambitious project to build tiny laser-driven spaceships that could accelerate to a quarter of the speed of light. “They are everywhere”, McDowell said.
“We want to know if there is life outside earth”, Claudio Melo, director of European Southern Observatory said.
“Proxima b would probably be the first exoplanet visited by a probe made by humans”, co-author Julien Morin, an astrophysicist at France’s University of Montpellier, told AFP.
“It is not unlikely that this planet is quite similar to Earth”.
Outside experts praised the finding as rock-solid and thrilling. We do live in a “Star Trek” universe.
It is this gravity-induced wobbling that leads scientists to establish a “fingerprint” of a planet, saying that this was strong evidence that something estimated to have 1.3X the mass of Earth was orbiting this star. That claim was met with suspicion by other astronomers, who later showed that it was unlikely to be real but a ghost signal from the past.
Anglada-Escude said there is only a 1-in-10-million chance that what they saw was a false positive, proclaiming “no doubt” that what he found was real. “Two different telescopes, two different techniques”.
“We have no clue whether this planet has an atmosphere or not, whether it has water or not”.
“The lifetime of Proxima is several trillion years, nearly a thousand times longer than the remaining lifetime of the sun”, said Abraham (Avi) Loeb of Harvard University.
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Let’s face it: Our sun is going to die in five billion years, so assuming we don’t self-destruct as a species we’re going to have to get off this rock at some point.
